Aesthetic Judgment

Beauty is an important part of our lives. Ugliness too. It is no
surprise then that philosophers since antiquity have been interested
in our experiences of and judgments about beauty and ugliness. They
have tried to understand the nature of these experiences and
judgments, and they have also wanted to know whether these experiences
and judgments were legitimate. Both these projects took a sharpened
form in the 20th century, when this part of our lives came under a
sustained attack in both European and North American intellectual circles.
Much of the discourse about beauty since the 18th century had deployed
a notion of the “aesthetic”, and so that notion in
particular came in for criticism. This disdain for the aesthetic may
have roots in a broader cultural Puritanism, which fears the
connection between the aesthetic and pleasure. Even to suggest, in the
recent climate, that an artwork might be good because it is
pleasurable, as opposed to cognitively, morally or politically
beneficial, is to court derision. The 20th century was not kind
to the notions of beauty or the aesthetic. Nevertheless, there were always some thinkers
— philosophers, as well as others in the study of particular
arts — who persisted in thinking seriously about beauty and the
aesthetic. In the first part of this essay, we will look at the
particularly rich account of judgments of beauty given to us by
Immanuel Kant. The notion of a “judgment of taste” is
central to Kant's account and also to virtually everyone working in
traditional aesthetics; so we begin by examining Kant's
characterization of the judgment of taste. In the second part, we look
at the issues that 20th century thinkers raised. We end by
drawing on Kant's account of the judgment of taste to consider whether
the notion of the aesthetic is viable.

What is a judgment of taste? Kant isolated two fundamental necessary
conditions for a judgment to be a judgment of taste —
subjectivity and universality (Kant 1790). Other
conditions may also contribute to what it is to be a judgment of
taste, but they are consequential on, or predicated on, the two
fundamental conditions. In this respect Kant followed the lead of
Hume and other writers in the British sentimentalist tradition (Hume
1757).

The first necessary condition of a judgment of taste is that it is
essentially subjective. What this means is that the judgment
of taste is based on a feeling of pleasure or displeasure. It is this
that distinguishes a judgment of taste from an empirical judgment.
Central examples of judgments of taste are judgments of beauty and
ugliness. (Judgments of taste can be about art or nature.)

This subjectivist thesis would be over-strict if it were interpreted
in an “atomistic” fashion, so that some subjective response
corresponds to every judgment of taste, and vice versa. Sometimes one
makes a judgment of taste on inductive grounds or on the basis of
authority. A more holistic picture of the relation between response and
judgment preserves the spirit of the subjectivist doctrine while
fitting our actual lives more accurately. The subjectivist doctrine
needs to be refined in order to deal with the cases of induction and
authority. But it must not be abandoned. The doctrine is basically
right.

However, it is not obvious what to make of the subjectivity of the
judgment of taste. We need an account of the nature of the pleasure on
which judgments of beauty are based.

Beyond a certain point, this issue cannot be pursued independently of
metaphysical issues about realism, for the metaphysics we favor is
bound to affect our view of the nature of the pleasure we take in
beauty. In particular, we need to know whether or not pleasure in
beauty represents properties of beauty and ugliness. If not, does it
involve our cognitive faculties in some other way, as Kant thought? Or
is it not a matter of the faculties that we deploy for understanding
the world, but a matter of sentimental reactions, which are schooled
in various ways, as Hume thought? These are very hard questions. But
there are some things we can say about the pleasure involved in
finding something beautiful without raising the temperature too
high.

Kant makes various points about pleasure in the beautiful, which fall
short of what we might call his “deep” account of the
nature of pleasure in beauty, according to which it is the harmonious
free play of imagination and understanding. According to Kant's
“surface” account of pleasure in beauty, it is not mere
sensuous gratification, as in the pleasure of sensation, or of eating
and drinking. Unlike such pleasures, pleasure in beauty is occasioned
by the perceptual representation of a thing. (These days, we might
feel more comfortable putting this by saying that pleasure in beauty
has an intentional content.) Moreover, unlike other sorts of
intentional pleasures, pleasure in beauty is
“disinterested”. This means, very roughly, that it is a
pleasure that does not involve desire — pleasure in beauty is
desire-free. That is, the pleasure is neither based on desire nor does
it produce one by itself. In this respect, pleasure in beauty is
unlike pleasure in the agreeable, unlike pleasure in what is good for
me, and unlike pleasure in what is morally good. According to Kant,
all such pleasures are “interested” — they are bound
up with desire. It may be that we have desires concerning beautiful
things, as Kant allows in sections 41 and 42 of the Critique of
Judgment, but so long as those desires are not intrinsic to the
pleasure in beauty, the doctrine that all pleasure is disinterested is
undisturbed. (Some critics of Kant miss this point.)

This is all important as far as it goes, but it is all negative. We
need to know what pleasure in beauty is, as well as what it
isn't. What can be said of a more positive nature?

In order to see what is special about pleasure in beauty, we must
shift the focus back to consider what is special about the judgment of
taste. For Kant, the judgment of taste claims “universal
validity”, which he describes as follows:

… when [a man] puts a thing on a pedestal and calls
it beautiful, he demands the same delight from others. He judges not
merely for himself, but for all men, and then speaks of beauty as if
it were a property of things. Thus he says that the thing is
beautiful; and it is not as if he counts on others agreeing with him
in his judgment of liking owing to his having found them in such
agreement on a number of occasions, but he demands this
agreement of them. He blames them if they judge differently, and
denies them taste, which he still requires of them as something they
ought to have; and to this extent it is not open to men to say: Every
one has his own taste. This would be equivalent to saying that there
is no such thing as taste, i.e. no aesthetic judgment capable of
making a rightful claim upon the assent of all men. (Kant 1790, p. 52;
see also pp. 136–139.)

Kant's idea is that in a judgment of taste, we demand or require
agreement from others in a way we do not in our judgments about the
niceness of Canary-wine, which is just a question of individual
preference. In matters of taste and beauty, we think that others
ought to share our judgment. That's why we blame them if they
don't. It is because the judgment of taste has such an aspiration to
universal validity that it seems “as if [beauty] were a
property of things.”

Now, if the above quotation were all that Kant had to say by way of
elucidating the judgment of taste, then he would not have said enough.
For the following question is left hanging: why do we require
that others share our judgment? We might want others to share
our judgment for all sorts of strange reasons. Maybe we will feel more
comfortable. Maybe we will win a bet. And if we say that they
ought to judge a certain way, we need to say more. In what
sense is this true? What if someone cannot appreciate some excellent
work of art because they are grief-stricken? What if it would distract
someone from some socially worthy project? Of what nature is this
“ought”?

We can recast the point about how we ought to judge in austere terms
by saying that there is a certain normative constraint on our
judgments of taste that is absent in our judgments about the niceness
of Canary-wine. The most primitive expression of this normativity is
this: some are correct, others incorrect. Or perhaps,
even more cautiously: some judgments are better than others.
We do not think that something is beautiful merely to me, in
the way that we might say that some things just happen to give
me sensuous pleasure. Of course, we might well say “I
thinkX is beautiful,” because we wish to
express uncertainty, but where we judge confidently, we think of our
judgment as being correct. And that means that we think that
the opposite judgment would be incorrect. We assume that not all
judgments of beauty are equally appropriate. “Each to their own
taste” only applies to judgments of niceness and nastiness, which
Kant calls “judgments of agreeableness” (see Kant 1790, pp.
51–53, p. 149).

Of course, some people just know about food (especially in
France and Italy). There are experts and authorities on making
delicious food and in knowing what will taste good (Kant 1790, pp.
52–53). But what these people know is what will taste pleasurable to a
certain kind of palate. In a sense, some things just do taste better
than others, and some judgments of excellence in food are better than
others. There is a sense in which some are even correct and others
incorrect. But still, this is only relative to “normal”
human beings. There is no idea of correctness according to which
someone with very unusual pleasures and displeasure is at fault, or
according to which the majority of human beings can be wrong. (Kant
says that judgments of agreeableness have “general” but
not “universal” validity; 1790, p. 53.) But in the
case of judgments of taste or beauty, correctness is not hostage to
what most people like or judge.

To say that a judgment of taste makes a claim to correctness
might seem merely to shift from the problematic “ought”
that is involved in a judgment of taste to a problematic
“correctness” or “betterness”. This may be
inevitable. We are dealing with a normative notion, and while some
normative notions may be explainable in terms of others, we cannot
express normative notions in non-normative terms.

In some cases the correctness of a judgment of taste may be
impossibly difficult to decide. We may even think that there is no
right answer to be had if we are asked to compare two very different
things. But in many other cases, we think that there
is a right and a wrong answer at which we are aiming, and
that our judgments can be erroneous. If we don't think this, in at
least some cases, then we are not making a judgment of taste —
we are doing something else.

Before we move on, it may be worth saying something about
“relativism”, according to which no judgments of taste are
really better than others. It is common for people to say, “There
is no right and wrong about matters of taste.” Or people will
express the same thought by saying that beauty is
“relative” to individual judgment, or even that it is
“socially relative”. Such relativism about value of all
sorts is part of the Zeitgeist of a certain recent Western
cultural tradition. It is part of the intellectual air, in certain
quarters. And in particular, many intellectuals have expressed a
dislike of the idea that judgments of taste really have any normative
claim, as if that would be uncouth or oppressive. However, if we are
describing our thought as it is, not how some think it ought to be,
then it is important that philosophers should be persistent and insist
— in the face of this Zeitgeist — that
normativity is a necessary condition of the judgment of taste. Two
points ought to embarrass the relativist. Firstly, people who say this
kind of thing are merely theorizing. In the case of judgments
of beauty, relativist theory is wildly out of step with common
practice. As with moral relativism, one can virtually always catch the
professed relativist about judgments of beauty making and acting on
non-relative judgments of beauty — for example, in their
judgments about music, nature and everyday household
objects. Relativists do not practice what they preach. Secondly, one
thing that drives people to this implausible relativism,
which is so out of line with their practice, is a perceived connection
with tolerance or anti-authoritarianism. This is what they see as
attractive in it. But this is upside-down. For if “it's all
relative” and no judgment is better than any other, then
relativists put their judgments wholly beyond criticism, and
they cannot err. Only those who think that there is a right and wrong
in judgment can modestly admit that they might be wrong. What looks
like an ideology of tolerance is, in fact, the very opposite. Thus
relativism is hypocritical and it is
intolerant.

In the normative claim of judgments of taste, as formulated
above, other people do not figure in the account. This is
an austere explanation of what Kant meant, or perhaps of what
he ought to have meant, when he said that the judgment of taste claims
“universal validity”, by contrast with judgments about the
niceness of Canary-wine. Given this account, we
can explain the fact that we think that others ought to share
our judgment. They ought to share it on pain of making a judgment
which is incorrect or inappropriate. And this would be why we
do in fact look to others to share our judgment; we don't want them to
make incorrect judgments. Kant's reference to other people in
characterizing the normativity of judgments of taste has dropped out
of the picture as inessential.

However, Kant would probably not go along with this, for he
characterizes the normativity in a way that ties in with his eventual
explanation of its possibility. Kant expresses the normative
idea in a very particular way. He writes:

[we] insist on others agreeing with our taste (Kant
1790, pp. 53.)

And Kant says that the judgment of taste involves

a claim to validity for all men… (Kant 1790, p.
51.)

By contrast, Kant thinks that although we sometimes speak as
if our judgments of the agreeable are universally valid
(“Lamb tastes better with garlic”), in fact they are not:
judgments of the agreeable appeal only to most but not to
all men (Kant 1790, pp. 52–53).

However, the austere characterization attempts to catch a more basic
idea of normativity — one that might serve as the target of
rival explanations. As far as explaining how subjectively universal
judgments are possible, Kant has a complicated story about the
harmonious interplay of the cognitive faculties — imagination
and understanding — which he thinks constitutes pleasure in
beauty (Kant 1790, p. 60). This “deep” account of pleasure
in beauty is highly controversial and not particularly plausible (see
Budd 2001). But we can see why Kant gives it. For Kant, the normative
claim of a judgment of taste has its roots in the more general
workings of our cognitive faculties, which Kant thinks we can assume
others share. Thus we have the beginnings of an explanation of how
such a pleasure can ground a judgment that makes a universal
claim. However, Kant does not have much to say about the nature
of the “universality” or normativity that is being
explained by such a speculative account of pleasure in beauty. It is
no accident that Kant phrases the obligation in interpersonal terms,
considering where he is going. And it may be no great fault on his
part that he does so. But for our purposes, we need to separate what
is being explained from its explanation. For if Kant's explanation
does not work, we want to be left with a characterization of the
normativity he was trying to explain. We need to separate Kant's
problem from his solution, so that the former is left if the latter
fails. Maybe there is an alternative solution to his problem.

As described, normativity attaches to judgments of taste
themselves. What does this imply for pleasure in beauty?
Since judgments of taste are based on responses of pleasure, it would
make little sense if our judgments were more or less appropriate but
our responses were not. The normative claim of our judgments of taste
must derive from the fact that we think that some
responses are better or more appropriate to their object than
others. Responses only license judgments which can be more or less
appropriate because responses themselves can be more or less
appropriate. If I get pleasure from drinking Canary-wine and you
don't, neither of us will think of the other as being
mistaken. But if you don't get pleasure from Shakespeare's
Sonnets, I will think of you as being in error — not just
your judgment, but your liking. I think that I am
right to have my response, and that your
response is defective. Someone who thinks that there
is, in Hume's words, “an equality of genius” between some
inferior composer, on the one hand, and J. S. Bach, on the other, has a
defective sensibility (Hume 1757, p. 230). Roger Scruton puts
the point well when he says:

When we study [the Einstein Tower and the Giotto campanile]
… our attitude is not simply one of curiosity, accompanied by
some indefinable pleasure or satisfaction. Inwardly, we affirm our
preference as valid… (Scruton 1979, p. 105).

This is the reason why we demand the same feeling from
others, even if we don't expect it. We think that our response is more
appropriate to its object than its opposite. And, in turn, this is
why we think that our judgment about that object is
more correct than its opposite. The normativity of judgment derives
from the normativity of feeling.

But how can some feelings be better or worse than others?
To answer this question, we need to ask: how far does the normativity
of judgments of taste inhere in the feeling itself? The realist about
beauty will say that the feeling has normativity built into it in
virtue of its representational content; the feelings themselves can be
more or less veridical. Pleasure in beauty, for example, has as its
object the genuine property of beauty; we find the beauty
pleasurable. A Humean sentimentalist will probably say that normativity
is something we somehow construct or foist upon our pleasures and
displeasures, which have no such content. And Kant has his own account,
which appeals to cognitive states that are not beliefs. The issue is
controversial. However, what we can say for sure is that it is
definitive of pleasure in beauty that it licenses judgments that make
claim to correctness. Beyond this, there will be theoretical
divergence.

This normativity is definitive of the judgment of taste, and is its
second defining characteristic, which we should add to the fact that it
is based on subjective grounds of pleasure or displeasure.

We can sum things up like this: judgments of taste occupy a
mid-point between judgments of niceness and nastiness, and empirical
judgments about the external world. Judgments of taste are like
empirical judgments in that they have universal validity, but they are
unlike empirical judgment in that they are made on the basis of an
inner response. Conversely, judgments of taste are like judgments of
niceness or nastiness in that they are made on the basis of an inner
subjective response or experience, but they are unlike judgments of
niceness and nastiness, which make no claim to universal validity. To
cut the distinctions the other way: in respect of normativity,
judgments of taste are like empirical judgments and unlike judgments of
niceness or nastiness, but in respect of subjectivity, judgments of
taste are unlike empirical judgments and like judgments of niceness or
nastiness. So we have a three-fold division: empirical judgments,
judgments of taste, and judgments of niceness or nastiness. And
judgments of taste have the two points of similarity and dissimilarity
on each side just noted.

As Kant recognized (more or less following Hume), all this is a
point from which to theorize. The hard question is
whether, and if so how, such a subjectively universal
judgment is possible. On the face of it, the two characteristics are in
tension with each other. Our puzzle is this: what must be the nature of
pleasure in beauty if the judgments we base on it can make claim to
correctness? This is the Big Question in aesthetics. Kant set the right
agenda for aesthetics. His problem was the right one, even if his
solution was not.

However, our hope thus far has been to get clearer
about what it is that is under scrutiny in this debate. Once we are
armed with a modest account of what a judgment of taste is, we can then
proceed to more ambitious questions about whether or not judgments of
taste represent real properties of beauty and ugliness. We can even
consider whether or not our whole practice of making judgments of taste
is defective and should be jettisoned. But first things first.

There is more to aesthetic judgment than just subjectivity and
normativity, and this should be described more fully. The following
is a survey of a number of other candidate features of aesthetic
judgments: truth, mind-independence, nonaesthetic dependence, and
laws.

The normativity of aesthetic judgments can be recast in
terms of a particular conception of aesthetic truth. For some
purposes, it is useful to do this. It might be thought that deploying the
idea of aesthetic truth commits one to the existence of an
aesthetic reality. But this worry springs from the assumption that a
strong correspondence conception of truth is all there ever is to
truth in any area where we might employ the notion. In many areas —
scientific and psychological thought, for example — a strong
correspondence conception of truth is likely to be in
question. However, the conception of truth applicable in aesthetics
might be one according to which truth only implies the sort of
normativity described above, according to which there are
correct and incorrect judgments of taste, or at least that some
judgments are better than others.

If we deploy the notion of truth, we can express the normative idea
by saying if a judgment is true then its opposite is false. Or we can
say that the law of non-contradiction applies to aesthetic judgments:
there are some aesthetic judgments such that they and their negations
cannot both be true. This principle need not hold of all judgments of
taste, so long as it holds of a significant proportion of them.

Such a normative conception of truth is stronger than a notion of
truth which is merely a device for “semantic assent”; that
is, normative truth is more than thin “disquotational”
truth. Even judgments of the agreeable, about the niceness of
Canary-wine, can have access to an inconsequential disquotational
conception of truth. We can say “'Canary-wine is
nice' is true if and only if Canary-wine is nice” without
raising the metaphysical temperature. However, judgments about the
niceness of Canary-wine do not aspire to a normative conception of
truth. There are no right and wrong answers to the question of whether
Canary-wine really is nice. And so, of neither the judgment that it is
nice nor the judgment that it is not nice can it be said that if it
is true then its opposite is false. But this is what we do say of some
aesthetic judgments.

However, although we can cast aesthetic normativity in terms
of truth, we need not do so. Aesthetic “truth”, in fact,
adds little to the notion of correctness that we have already
encountered. We can do without the word “true”. We can say
that something cannot both be beautiful and ugly (in the same respect
at the same time), and that if something is beautiful then it is not
ugly (in the same respect at the same time).

[What Mary Mothersill calls her “Second Thesis” in her
book Beauty Restored is the thesis that a judgment of taste,
such as “Beethoven's first Rasumovsky quartet … is
beautiful (has artistic merit)” (p. 145) “is a
‘genuine’ judgment” (p. 146). However, as she
realizes, we then need to know what makes a judgment a
genuine judgment. She mentions truth, but wisely does not
stop there. What she then adds in order to explain this are various
normative characteristics, such as the aspiration to correctness
(pp. 157–170). So in the end her view on this matter converges
with the normative idea already described.]

Given an understanding of the normativity of judgments of taste
— which we might or might not express in terms of aesthetic
truth — we can and should add some more sophisticated normative
features, which are also important.

One such feature is mind-independence. Mind-independence is
best expressed as a negative thesis: whether something is beautiful
does not depend on my judgment. Thinking it so doesn't make it
so. This can be re-expressed in conditional terms: it is not the
case that if I think something is beautiful then it is beautiful. This
is common sense. For example, we tend to think that our judgments
have improved since we were younger. We think that some of our past
judgments were in error. So thinking it so, at that time, did not make
it so.

We also think that beauty, ugliness and other aesthetic properties
depend on nonaesthetic properties. Dependence contrasts with
mind-independence in that it says what aesthetic properties
do depend on, as opposed to what they don't depend
on; the aesthetic properties of a thing depend on its nonaesthetic
properties. This dependence relation implies (but is not identical
with) the supervenience relation or relations: (a) two aesthetically
unlike things must also be nonaesthetically unlike; (b) something
couldn't change aesthetically unless it also changed nonaesthetically;
and (c) something could not have been aesthetically different unless
it were also nonaesthetically different. These are, respectively:
cross-object supervenience, cross-time supervenience, and cross-world
supervenience. (“Supervenience” has often been discussed
under the heading of “dependence” but actually they are
distinct relations, related in a complex way.) Sibley's papers
“Aesthetic Concepts” and
“Aesthetic/Nonaesthetic” were pioneering discussions of
the dependence of the aesthetic on the nonaesthetic (Sibley 1959,
1965).

Some have argued that what aesthetic properties depend on (their
“dependence base”) extends beyond the intrinsic physical
and sensory features of the object of aesthetic assessment (Walton
1970). The nonaesthetic dependence base, Walton thinks, always
includes “contextual properties” — matters to do
with the origin of the work of art, or other works of art. Others dispute this (Zangwill
1999). This is one aspect of the debate over
formalism. However, this issue need not concern us here. The important
thing is that some dependence thesis holds. The controversial
question is about the extent of the dependence base of
aesthetic properties, not whether aesthetic properties have
some nonaesthetic dependence base.

This claim is very intuitive, but let us try to say something more in
support of it. It seems to be a deep fact about beauty and other
aesthetic properties that they are inherently “sociable”;
beauty cannot be lonely. Something cannot be barely beautiful; if
something is beautiful then it must be in virtue of its nonaesthetic
properties. Furthermore, realizing this is a constraint on our
judgments of beauty and other aesthetic properties. We cannot just
judge that something is beautiful; we must judge that it is beautiful
in virtue of its nonaesthetic properties. In fact, we usually do so,
and not to do so is bizarre. (Even in cases of testimony, we hold that
the aesthetic properties of a thing hold in virtue of nonaesthetic
properties that the aesthetic expert knows.) Of course, we might not
have in mind every single nonaesthetic property of the thing, nor
exactly how the nonaesthetic properties produce their aesthetic
effect. But we think that certain nonaesthetic properties
are responsible for the aesthetic properties and that without
those nonaesthetic properties, the aesthetic properties would not have
been instantiated. Beauty does not float free, and recognizing this is
constitutive of aesthetic thought. Our aesthetic thought, therefore,
is fundamentally different from our thought about colors, with which
it is often compared. Perhaps colors are tied in some intimate way to
intrinsic or extrinsic physical properties of the surfaces of things,
such as reflectance properties. But color thought does not presuppose
this. Someone might even think that colors are bare properties of
things. But one cannot think that beauty is bare; it is essential to
aesthetic thought to realize that the aesthetic properties of a thing
arise from its nonaesthetic properties.

The principles of correctness, mind-independence and dependence can
be phrased in the property mode or in terms of truth. We can cast them
either way. We can say that whether something is beautiful does not
depend on what we think about it, but it does depend on its
nonaesthetic features. Or we can equally well say that the truth of
aesthetic judgments is independent of our aesthetic judgments but it
is dependent on nonaesthetic truths. Semantic ascent changes little.

Thus far we have been making positive claims about features of
aesthetic judgments. Let us now consider the claim that there are no
interesting nonaesthetic-to-aesthetic laws, rules or principles, and
the claim that aesthetic/nonaesthetic dependence relation can obtain,
even though there are no such interesting laws, rules or
principles. By “interesting” laws of taste we mean
generalizations to the effect that anything of such and such a
nonaesthetic kind is of such and such aesthetic kind, and
these generalizations can be used to predict aesthetic properties on
the basis of knowledge of nonaesthetic properties. In this sense, many
find it plausible that there are no laws of taste and aesthetic
properties are anomalous.

The problem of the source of correctness in aesthetic judgment is
independent of the question of whether there are laws, rules or
principles of taste. There is no reason to think that the possibility
of correct or true judgments depends on the existence of laws, rules
or principles from which we can deduce our correct or true
judgments. (For this reason, it is difficult to be gripped by the
central puzzle of Mary Mothersill's Beauty Restored —
which is how there can be aesthetic truths without aesthetic laws
— although this problem is perhaps a cousin of the problem that
Hume and Kant think is central.)

Nevertheless the anomalousness of aesthetics is worth thinking about
in its own right. Many aestheticians agree that the aesthetic is
anomalous in the above sense. But they are not agreed on the
explanation of anomalousness.

A notable exception is Monroe Beardsley, who claims —
heroically and extraordinarily — that there are exactly three
aesthetic principles: things are aesthetically excellent either by
being unified or intense or complex (Beardsley 1958, chapter XI).
However, Beardsley's 'trinitarian' position faces a difficulty similar
to that faced by moral philosophers who appeal to “thick”
concepts. If Beardsley insists on a lawlike connection between his
three thick substantive aesthetic properties (unity, intensity and
complexity) and aesthetic value, he can only do so at the cost of
conceding anomalousness between the three thick substantive aesthetic
properties and nonaesthetic properties. There are three layers and
one can hold onto laws between the top and middle layers only by
losing laws between the middle and bottom layers. Maybe intensity is
always aesthetically good, but there are no laws about what makes
things intense.

Granting the anomalousness of aesthetic properties, then, we need to
explain it. There is great plausibility in Hume and Kant's suggestion
that what explains the anomalousness of the aesthetic is the first
feature of judgments of taste — that judgments of taste are
essentially subjective, unlike ordinary empirical judgments about
physical, sensory, or semantic properties (Hume 1757,
pp. 231–232; Kant 1790, pp. 55–56,
pp. 136–142). This is why the two sorts of concepts are not
“nomologically made for each other” (as Donald Davidson
says about mental and physical concepts (Davidson 1980)). How can we
bring an essentiallly subjective range of judgments nomologically into
line with a range of empirical judgments? The two answer to quite
different sets of constraints. Frank Sibley observed that aesthetic
concepts are not positively “condition-governed” (Sibley
1959). And Mary Mothersill claimed that there are no laws of
taste. But neither did much to explain those facts. The appeal to
subjectivity explains what Sibley and Mothersill notice and
describe. Indeed Mothersill writes of her “First Thesis”
(FT) that there are no genuine principles or laws of taste:
“…FT is central to aesthetics, and there is, as far as I
can see, nothing more fundamental from which it could be
derived” (Mothersill 1984, p. 143). But it seems that it
can be derived from the subjectivity of judgments of
taste.

This kind of anomalousness is one thing, dependence or supervenience
another. Even though aesthetic properties are anomalous, they depend
and supervene on nonaesthetic properties. Many find such a combination
of relations uncomfortable outside aesthetics, such as in moral
philosophy and the philosophy of mind. Yet there seem to be good
reasons to embrace both principles in aesthetics. Both are firmly
rooted in ordinary aesthetic thought.

Aesthetic judgments have certain essential features, and
corresponding to those features are certain principles. We can group
correctness, mind-independence, and nonaesthetic dependence
together. However, it does no harm to focus on the feature of
correctness or universal validity for this is the most basic of the
features. If aesthetic judgments did not claim correctness or
universal validity, they could not claim the other features. If
explaining correctness or universal validity is a problem, then so is
explaining mind-independence and dependence. But clearly there
is a problem about explaining all three features. Why
does our aesthetic thought have these three features and thus
operate according to these three principles? And what is the source of
the right of aesthetic judgments to them? Hume and Kant spend
much mental effort on these questions. These presuppositions of
aesthetic judgments need to be explained and justified. Given that our
aesthetic judgments have these commitments, we need to know how such
judgments are possible, how they are actual, and how they are
legitimate. Having described and analyzed, as we have done here, we
need to explain and justify. But, as noted earlier, we first need a
good description of what we are trying to explain and justify.

An idea that plays a large role in Kant's discussion of the subjective
universality of the judgment of taste is that of disinterestedness,
and so some words about this idea are in order. Kant claims that (a)
pleasure in the beautiful is “disinterested”, and (b) only
pleasure in the beautiful is “disinterested” (Kant 1790,
pp. 42–50). This plays a large role in Kant's project, for Kant
connects disinterestedness with the claim to universal validity of the
judgment of taste. However, before we go any further is crucial to
recognize that the German word “interesse” has a
special meaning in 18th century German, and should not be confused
with similar sounding English words or even contemporary German
words. For Kant an interesse means a kind of pleasure that is
not connected with desire; it is neither grounded in desire, nor does
it produce it.

We should distinguish Kant's ambitious thesis that only
pleasure in the beautiful is disinterested from his less ambitious
claim simply that pleasure in the beautiful is disinterested
— for it seems that there could in principle be other
disinterested pleasures. The less ambitious claim, however, is
controversial enough. The more uncontroversial component of that less
ambitious claim is that pleasure in the beautiful is
not grounded in the satisfaction of desire. It is plausible,
surely, that when we take pleasure in something we find beautiful,
this is not pleasure in the thought that we have got something that we
desire. Moreover, Kant wants pleasure in the beautiful to be open to
all (so there should be no “aesthetic luck”), and if
desire varied from person to person, depending on what they happen to
desire, it seems that we could not require that pleasure from
everyone, as the idea of universal validity requires. Hence the claim
to universal validity would be lost if pleasure in beauty were not
disinterested in the sense of not being based on desire.

However, it is not so clear that pleasure in the beautiful cannot
produce desire, which Kant requires for a pleasure to be
disinterested. The issue here is whether the pleasure can produce desire
from itself. Kant admits that we have certain general
concerns with beauty that mean that desire may follow from a judgment
of beauty, but according to Kant, such desires do not have their
source solely in the pleasure in the beautiful (Kant 1790,
pp. 154–162, on “empirical interest” and
“intellectual interest”). So the less ambitious thesis is
controversial because of the second component.

Moreover, whether only pleasure in beauty is disinterested,
and no other kind of pleasures are disinterested — the ambitious
thesis — is even more controversial. These are live
issues. Kant's views have much to be said for them. But Hume would
probably deny Kant's separation of pleasure in beauty from the
motivations that lead us to act. In his Genealogy of Morals,
Frederich Nietzsche targets Kant's separation of pleasure in beauty
from desire, a separation that is designed to make beauty available to
all human beings (Nietzsche 1998). (This criticism is distinct from
the criticism of the idea that judgements of beauty are valid
for all human beings.) Nietzsche protests at seeing pleasure in beauty
as cut-off from the particularities and idiosyncrasies of our
passionate lives. It is not clear who is right here. The nub of the
issue is the nature of pleasure in the beautiful. Does it have its
source in what Human beings share, or in what distinguishes them? Kant
might argue, against a Hume or a Nietzsche, that seeing pleasure in
beauty as springing from what varies between people, not only places
people at the mercy of their good or bad aesthetic 'upbringing', but
also makes untenable the normative claims to correctness or universal
validity that are part of judgements of beauty, as we ordinarily
conceive of them. If judgements of beauty were based on variable
pleasures or displeasures then it seems that the claim to correctness
is fraudulent. But this only follows if we follow Kant in locating
pleasure in beauty, and our right to make judgements of beauty, in the
cognitive faculties that all human beings share. For Kant, there is an
aesthetic 'ought' binding all human beings because we all have the
cognitive faculties that it takes to have the pleasure in
question. But this is not the only conceivable source of the aesthetic
'ought'. One non-Kantian answer would be to locate the source of
normativity of aesthetic judgement, in the world, not in what Human
beings share. This would be to invoke a kind of 'aesthetic realism',
whereby beauty and ugliness are genuine properties of the world. This
would not suit Hume, but might in principle be available to
Nietzsche.

Let us now turn to the contemporary notion of the aesthetic. The
predicate “aesthetic” can qualify many different kinds of
things: judgments, experiences, concepts, properties, or words. It is
probably best to take aesthetic judgments as central. We can
understand other aesthetic kinds of things in terms of aesthetic
judgments: aesthetic properties are those that are ascribed in
aesthetic judgments; aesthetic experiences are those that ground
aesthetic judgments; aesthetic concepts are those that are deployed in
aesthetic judgments; and aesthetic words are those that have the
function of being used in the linguistic expression of aesthetic
judgments.

The most common contemporary notion of an aesthetic judgment would
take judgments of beauty and ugliness as paradigms — what we
called “judgments of taste” in part 1. And it excludes
judgments about physical properties, such as shape and size, and
judgments about sensory properties, such as colors and
sounds. However, in addition to judgments of beauty and ugliness, the
contemporary notion of an aesthetic judgment is typically used to
characterize a class of judgments that also includes judgments of
daintiness, dumpiness, delicacy and elegance. In this respect, the
contemporary notion seems to be broader than Kant's, since he focused
just on judgments of beauty and ugliness. However, there is also a
respect in which the contemporary notion seems to be narrower than
Kant's notion. For Kant used the notion to include both judgments of
beauty (or of taste) as well as judgments of the agreeable
— for instance, the judgment that Canary-wine is nice (Kant
1790, pp. 41–42 and p. 54). But the modern notion, unlike Kant's,
excludes judgments of the agreeable. The contemporary notion
also excludes judgments about pictorial and semantic content of a work of art. For
example, although the judgment that a painting represents a flower
might be “relevant” to an aesthetic judgment about it, it
is not itself an aesthetic judgment.

The question is: is the contemporary classification 'aesthetic' arbitrary? What
is it that distinguishes judgments as aesthetic? What do they
have in common? And how do they differ from other kinds of judgment? Do
these judgments form a well-behaved kind?

Incidentally, it may be worth mentioning that the notion of an
aesthetic judgment should obviously not be elucidated in terms of the
idea of a work of art; we make aesthetic judgments about nature and we
make nonaesthetic judgments about works of art. I take this to be
uncontroversial (although apparently Hegel denies it).

The articulation and defense of the notion of the aesthetic in modern
times is associated with Monroe Beardsley (1958, 1982) and Frank
Sibley (1959, 1965). But their work was attacked by George Dickie, Ted
Cohen and Peter Kivy among others (Dickie 1965, Cohen 1973, Kivy
1975).

Beardsley claimed, somewhat heroically, that aesthetic experience is
distinguished by its unity, intensity and complexity. Dickie argued,
in reply, that such characteristics were either not plausibly
necessary conditions of aesthetic experience, or else that Beardsley's
description of them was inadequate. Part of Dickie's attack was
completely beside the point, since he confused aesthetic experiences
with the experiences of works of art; the fact that some experiences
of works of art are not as Beardsley describes is irrelevant. But it
cannot be denied that Dickie was right that even if the problems of
characterizing the three features were resolved, it would still not be
plausible that the three Beardsleyian features are necessary (or
sufficient) conditions of aesthetic experience. Nevertheless, all that
would show would be that
Beardsley's account of the aesthetic is inadequate. That
Beardsley's extraordinary and heroic trinitarian doctrine cannot be
maintained does not mean that the notion of the aesthetic should be
abandoned. That would be a flawed induction from a single
instance.

Sibley claimed that the discernment of aesthetic properties requires a
special sensitivity, whereas the discernment of nonaesthetic
properties could be achieved by anyone with normal eyes and ears.
Furthermore Sibley claimed that it was distinctive of aesthetic terms
or concepts that they were not “condition-governed”, in
the sense that they had no nonaesthetic positive criteria for their
application. He thought of the faculty of taste as special mental
faculty, possessed by people with a special sensitivity. This account
of the aesthetic was inadvisable, since it allowed critics like Cohen
and Kivy to argue that ascribing aesthetic properties did not in fact
require a special faculty, since anyone can distinguish a graceful
line from an ungraceful line. Moreover, some aesthetic ascriptions, such as elegance, do
seem to be nonaesthetically 'condition-governed', in Sibley's sense.
Nevertheless — once again — that Sibley's
positive account of the aesthetic is implausible should not lead us to
despair about the aesthetic. On the other hand, the pessimistic
induction, now with two instances under its belt, is perhaps looking a
little less unhealthy — especially given two such distinguished
exponents.

Despite this, Sibley was surely minimally right to think that
ascribing aesthetic properties to a thing requires more than merely
knowing its nonaesthetic properties. Whether or not it is
distinctively difficult, erudite, sophisticated or
non-condition-governed, aesthetic understanding is something over and
above nonaesthetic understanding. So perhaps we should keep on trying
to articulate the notion of the aesthetic, or at least a useful notion
of the aesthetic.

One strategy is the following. Begin with the account of what
it is to be a judgment of taste, or of beauty and ugliness, that was
outlined in part 1, and then use that to elucidate the broader notion
of an aesthetic judgment. To recall, it was argued that Kant was
right, with qualifications, to think that the crucial thing about the
judgment of taste is that it has what he calls “subjective
universality”; judgments of taste are those that are (a) based
on responses of pleasure or displeasure, and (b) claim universal validity, where that
can be minimally interpreted as a normative aspiration. The present
strategy is to use this Kantian account in order to ground a wider
category of the aesthetic, which includes judgments of taste along
with judgments of daintiness, dumpiness, delicacy, elegance, and the
rest.

Let us call judgments of taste, or judgments of beauty and ugliness,
“verdictive aesthetic judgments”, and let us call the
other aesthetic judgments (of daintiness, dumpiness, elegance,
delicacy, etc.) “substantive aesthetic judgments”. The idea
is that these substantive judgments are aesthetic in virtue of a
special close relation to verdictive judgments of taste, which are
subjectively universal. (We can assume that judgments of beauty and
ugliness coincide with judgments of aesthetic merit and
demerit. However, even if beauty were taken to be a substantive
aesthetic notion, like elegance, delicacy or daintiness, there would
remain some other overarching notion of aesthetic merit or excellence,
and we could take that notion as central.)

On this approach, judgments of daintiness, dumpiness, delicacy and
elegance stand in a special and intimate relation to judgments of
beauty and ugliness (or aesthetic merit and demerit), and it is only
in virtue of this intimate relation that we can think of all these
judgments as belonging to the same category.

Now, what exactly is this special intimate relation between verdictive
and substantive aesthetic judgments? Firstly,
substantive judgments describe ways of being beautiful or
ugly (Burton 1992, Zangwill 1995). It is part of what it
is for a thing to be elegant, delicate or dainty that it is
beautiful in a particular way. And secondly, it is part of
the meaning of substantive aesthetic judgments that they
imply verdictive aesthetic judgments. This is the hierarchical
proposal.

[Remark: this may not be true of words like
“dainty” and “delicate”, but it is true of the
particular substantive judgments that we linguistically
express in such words on particular occasions. Both Beardsley and
Sibley seem to have made the mistake of casting these issues at the
linguistic level rather than at the level of thought; they should have
focused not on aesthetic words but on aesthetic judgments and
responses. (Sibley did say in footnote 1 of Sibley 1959 that he was
concerned with “uses” of aesthetic words, but he and
everyone else ignored that qualification.)]

Let us now see how this hierarchical proposal works. Consider an
abstract pattern of curving lines, which is elegant. It might be
necessary that that pattern is beautiful. This is because the
beauty depends on or is determined by that specific
pattern. But it is not part of what it is to be that pattern
that it is beautiful. That is, the pattern is necessarily beautiful but
it is not essentially beautiful. (On the general distinction between
necessity and essence, see Fine 1994.) Furthermore, we can think of
that pattern without thinking of it as beautiful.

By contrast, it is both necessary and essential
that something that is elegant is beautiful. And this is reflected in
our concepts and judgments. We can think of the pattern without thereby
thinking of it as beautiful, but to think of the pattern as elegant is
to think of it as beautiful, at least in certain respects. Hence
elegance is an aesthetic concept.

The hierarchical proposal thus seems to characterize a non-arbitrary
and useful notion of the aesthetic. If so, the contemporary broad
notion of the aesthetic can be vindicated.

Jerrold Levinson has argued that not all substantive properties have
evaluative valence (Levinson 2001). One of his examples is of 'starkly
grim'. If so being starkly grim cannot be a way of being beautiful of
ugly. However, the defender of hierarchy could reply that it is
specific uses of these words, in context, that pick out features that
have evaluative valence. The particular instance of stark grimness is
a valueble aspect of a thing.

Are representational properties aesthetic properties? Suppose that a
painting represents a tree and is a beautiful representation of a tree.
It is not merely beautiful and a tree representation but
beautiful as a tree representation (Zangwill 1999). Of course,
that the painting represents a tree is “relevant” to
whether it is beautiful because it is part of what its
beauty depends on. But being beautiful is not part of what it is to be a
representation of a tree. Moreover, to think that the painting
represents a tree is not thereby to think that it is beautiful. Being
beautiful is not an essential property of the representation, and
thinking of the representation does not mean thinking of it as
beautiful, even though it may be necessary that it is beautiful.
Hence representational properties are not aesthetic properties.

What about sublimity? Why prioritize beauty and ugliness among
aesthetic concepts? It is true that there is a long tradition of
conceiving of sublimity such that it excludes beauty (Burke 1998). If
we conceive of beauty as merely an elegant and pretty value property,
then that would be a narrow concept of beauty, which would be a
substantive aesthetic property. (See Levinson 2012.) However, it is
not clear that there is much reason to restrict beauty and ugliness in
this way. If beauty is a generic aesthetic value, then sublimity can
be understood as a kind of beauty. In that case, it turns out that it
is sublimity that is a substantive aesthetic concept, not beauty. On
this view, beauty and sublimity are not opposed. Instead sublimity is
a kind of beauty.

Substantive aesthetic judgments attracted much attention in the
latter half of the 20th century. But to some extent this may have
been a mistake, since it seems that the role of such judgments is to serve verdictive
aesthetic judgments of beauty and ugliness. Beauty and ugliness are the
primary aesthetic notions, which give sense to the wider class that
contemporary aestheticians include as “aesthetic”. We need
a hierarchical rather than an egalitarian conception of aesthetic
notions. The broad notion of the aesthetic can be fixed by what it is
to judge that something is beautiful or ugly, or that it has aesthetic
merit or demerit. Only by seeing beauty and ugliness as the preeminent
aesthetic notions can we make sense of a unitary category of the
aesthetic, which includes the dainty and the dumpy, and which excludes
physical, sensory and representational properties of things, as well as
their agreeableness. The hierarchical proposal allows us to make the
aesthetic/nonaesthetic distinction in a useful way and answer Beardsley
and Sibley's critics. Thus the notion of the aesthetic can be defended.
That leaves open the deep question of how aesthetic judgments are
possible — a matter not addressed here.